AT&T Researchers — Inventing the Science Behind the Service

When cell towers fail, what happens to customers? In a resilient network where customers may simply move from a failed tower to another one nearby, the answer is not always clear. And it can’t be captured by manual assessments that rely only on counting the number of failed towers and estimating population density, and thus ignore how an outage may be dispersed over a wide area.

What’s needed is an in-depth analysis of network data. It’s why AT&T Researchers created a tower-outage analyzer, which looks at the complex interactions among customers and cell towers to intelligently assess the customer experience across an entire impact area. Read more.

Imagine arriving home and signaling your digital availability by moving pebbles from one bowl to another: one bowl for close friends only (or for text messages only), another for wider availability. It's a refreshingly simple use of physical objects to maintain control in a plugged-in age. And it is the idea behind Lana Yarosh's Availabowls project, which works by attaching programmable RFID tags to pebbles. For more information about Availabowls, see this article.

Machine speech translation is hard to do; it requires recognizing the language, transcribing it, doing the translation—all while the person is talking. Processing requirements are enormous.

In this Popular Mechanics interview, Mazin Gilbert describes how AT&T Research is incorporating machine learning and cloud technology to enhance its speech technologies—representing over 30 years of research—and make smooth, seamless translation a reality.